Less stuff, happier life: The philosophy of Graham Hill

Updated 5:14 PM ET, Tue June 11, 2013

Editor's Note: Tune in to CNN Saturday, June 15th, at 2:30 pm ET to see "The Next List's" 30-minute profile of Graham Hill.

Graham Hill is an entrepreneur, designer and environmentalist who started a website called LifeEdited.com. He evangelizes the idea that living a pared down life can make you happier, healthier and wealthier. And that editing down all the unnecessary and gratuitous stuff in your life will give you a smaller carbon footprint and a cleaner conscience.

“Every less cubic foot of air means less to clean, heat, cool, insure and move," says Hill. “The more space, the more complex your life gets.”

Hill says that over last 50 years, average housing size has increased nearly three times while families have gotten smaller, but people are not any happier.

“Living within our means is financially and environmentally good. Having an unorganized life full of crap is not a recipe for happiness,” he says.

To help illustrate his idea, Hill purchased two apartments in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. He launched a competition, crowd-sourcing the design to renovate the first one, which was only 420 square feet. Required for the winning bid: room for a couple, space for a sit-down dinner for 10-12 people, room for overnight guests and a workspace among other amenities. The second apartment is currently under construction.

The result is a design marvel. Sanjay Gupta paid a visit to check out all the bells and whistles, including a movable wall that makes space for two drop-down bunk beds. You have to see it to believe it.

Hill isn’t advocating a monastic existence. Rather, he believes that good design and a system of shared amenities (he calls it a Product Library) will allow for all the creature comforts with a minimum of hastle.

Imagine the Product Library as a way to borrow big, bulky items when you need them, such as coolers, folding chairs, a standup paddleboard, a karaoke machine, a sewing machine. His idea is to design a cost-effective system to access them and reserve them on line.

There is something of a movement to build and design smaller apartments commensurate with demographic trends. San Francisco, Hong Kong, London and most recently New York City have all taken high-profile forays into the micro-unit space.

Hill is involved in a similar project in Las Vegas with Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos. Hsieh is moving Zappos headquarters to Las Vegas and investing $350 million of his own money to remake a section of downtown into a hub for high tech and creativity. Hsieh saw Hill's Tedtalk on an Edited Life and solicited ideas to build micro housing for his employees.

Graham Hill is, above all, an environmentalist. His concern for the environment and human impact on it informs everything he does. (He was the founder of TreeHugger.com which he later sold to Discovery.)

Hill was a crew member on the 2010 voyage of the Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran made out of 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles and other plastic waste products. The crew traveled more than 8,000 nautical miles from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia to raise awareness about plastic waste and its affect on marine life. And to show how waste can be used as a valuable resource.